


The Secret to a Happy Marriage Remains a Secret

by lullabelle



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Community: redisourcolor, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-24
Updated: 2010-06-24
Packaged: 2018-01-07 11:38:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1119388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lullabelle/pseuds/lullabelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 2006 Ianto Jones spent an awesome, but miserable, night on the beach.  In 2008, he helped clean up after a wedding night gone horribly wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Secret to a Happy Marriage Remains a Secret

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the redisourcolor challenge #4: Weddings. The quote to use was: ''We are not having anything pink in this event.'' and the words to incorporate were "ice", "rose", and "lightning". Beta'd by heddychaa.

It was cold this close to the ocean and everything felt damp and clammy, even inside the tent. They'd tried to zip their sleeping bags together, only to discover that the bags were completely different sizes, with different size zips, and in the end they had just jammed into one, with Lisa's head tucked under his chin, arms around each other out of necessity, though they wouldn't have put them anywhere else even if they could. One of Ianto's arms went numb after only twenty minutes.

Every so often the sky lit up like a giant camera flash. They were out more or less in the open, and Ianto hoped they wouldn't get struck by lightning. He opened his mouth to suggest moving closer to the treeline (or even better, to a hotel) just as the rain began to bucket down and he decided they were fine right where they were.

Maybe Lisa had wanted to talk, but they had been talking all day, and walking, and climbing, and even swimming a bit, and it was the most physical activity that Ianto'd had in months. He knew it was the same for Lisa, even though she was better about visiting the gym than he was, and in the end exhaustion took them both and they fell asleep.

***

Ianto's first job, as part of Operation Wedding Fairy, was one of the toughest, at least physically. Helping Jack get everyone out of the hall. After manhandling the first two wedding guests upstairs, they'd discovered the modern marvel of the luggage cart, after which they managed to get a solid routine going. Ianto would pat the guest down. If the guest had room keys, they would take them to that room, as well as any family members they knew of. That part was a little tougher because, even though both he and Jack were observant, they'd both been otherwise occupied most of the night and... well. It ended up being something of a crapshoot.

"Maybe we can just pair them up at random. Because if _both_ partners wake up in bed with someone else..." Jack let the sentence dangle.

Ianto didn't even have the energy left to be properly appalled. "The row will be somehow less epic?"

"At least we'd be robbing someone of the moral high ground. Even the playing field."

They got it done pretty quickly over all, even taking the time to get one of the beds convincingly messy because -- surprise -- weddings made Jack horny. They mostly made Ianto sad.

***

Lisa jerked awake, which jerked Ianto awake. He had no idea what time it was, but it was still completely dark out, and the rain had subsided from a deluge to a drizzle.

"Bad dream?" he asked into her hair. He had warmed up a bit, except for his feet, which were sweaty and freezing, and his head, which was exposed. Lisa's legs ended at his shins. Her feet were cold, too.

"Mm," she mumbled. "Yeah, but..." she laughed a little. "It was the kind of dream that's only bad when you're having it. Once you wake up it's just kind of weird."

His ears were cold and his nose was cold, and he just knew that he would never be completely warm or dry again. He knew for certain he would not be sleeping again tonight, so he might as well keep Lisa awake for company. Camping had been her idea, after all. "Tell me about it?"

She sighed, because she knew his game, but indulged him anyway. "We were getting married..." She paused, daring him to react, and then continued when he didn't. "Well, first a little context. I went to my cousin's wedding about a year ago. Her wedding colors were pink and silver. It was awful. It looked like her wedding was being sponsored by Pepto-Bismol. Which wouldn't have been inappropriate, actually, because the whole thing was sickening. It was all so... fake. It wasn't like a real wedding, it was like a fourteen-year-old's dream wedding. There was an ice statue of Cupid. Seriously. They're divorced now, which makes me feel a little better about the whole thing. Anyway..."

She paused, giving Ianto an opportunity to get a word in edgewise if he so chose, but he just said, "Go on," in that warm tone he sometimes used with her. It was a tone that said: _I like the sound of your voice, even when you're using it to talk like a crazy person._

"So we were getting married, and I was _adamant_ that there be no pink. I was going around telling everyone there would be absolutely _no pink_ at this event. And then your sister gifted us with a hundred plastic flamingoes and the whole thing went to hell. Not to mention, the tailor fucked up my wedding dress and made it out of tin foil. Idiot." She smiled against his chest. The first button on his flannel shirt had come undone, and she worried her nose against the V of hair poking out. "So. Care to interpret my dream for me?"

Ianto shrugged, and wondered a little if he was going to lose the use of his sleeping arm. "Obviously you closely identify with baked potatoes. And you dream of marrying me." And then he asked, "Do you dream of marrying me often?" and he meant it to be teasing, but his voice made it sound serious, and he wondered if she could hear his heart skip a beat with her face pressed against his chest.

In his arms, she went stone still. Then she said, "Sometimes, yeah."

***

"Ianto, sweetheart, I have a favor to ask." Gwen bustled up to him, probably the first time she'd been away from Rhys since the ring went on her finger. Ianto barely managed to suppress a wince. He wasn't a huge fan of casual terms of endearment, but that wasn't something he would be telling her today, not while she was all smiling and happy and significantly less round.

"Yes?" In his hand he twisted a small piece of wire around the stems of two flowers and a sprig of baby's breath.

Gwen hesitated, like she wasn't quite sure how to phrase her request, and then blurted out, "Our deejay is dead."

Ianto quirked his eyebrow at her for a moment, not quite sure what she was asking. Then the lightbulb went on. "You want me to deejay your wedding reception?"

Gwen nodded. "Please." And she gave him the biggest, most wide-eyed please-face she could possibly manage. With her now ill-fitting wedding dress still lightly splattered with alien guts, it wasn't ineffective.

"Owen --"

"I trust you more than Owen to not completely mortify me in front of all my friends and family. Please don't make me resort to Owen."

Guilt. Another effective tactic. "Fine. Let me go tell Jack."

Gwen clapped her together hands excitedly and gave him a big hug before he could dodge.

He found Jack at the table and pinned the makeshift corsage to his shirt. It was made of two small roses, one red and one white; a bit fancier than the chrysanthemums everyone else was wearing, but if anyone could pull off a little decadence, it was Jack. While he worked on getting the corsage on without stabbing anyone's chest or fingers, Jack reached out to straighten his tie and the collar of his shirt, hands lingering.

In the end, Ianto wasn't sure if he disliked Gwen calling him "sweetheart" because Lisa used to, or because Jack _didn't._

Jack's corsage fell off him before the reception was half over, the red and white mashed together on the dance floor into a long streak of pink.

***

Lisa and Ianto had talked into the early hours of the morning, finally getting up only to shoo a dog who mistook their tent for a fire hydrant. The conversation had left him feeling elated, because one thing had become clear. If he proposed to Lisa, she would say yes. It would be a long engagement, which he was fine with, but she would say yes. He started thinking about rings. He knew that she preferred silver to gold, so he split her preference with his own sense of traditionalism and bought a white gold ring with a diamond just big enough to embarrass her. He completely maxed out his credit card, but she was worth it.

He had been sitting at his desk, playing with the small box in his pocket and playing over proposal scenarios in his head, when the alarms went off.

Over the course of the next few hours, he lost the ring along with everything else.

When his credit card provider had called him two days later about a suspiciously large charge to his account, he claimed to know nothing about it.

***

When Ianto Jones had gotten dressed that morning, he knew that he might be going to a wedding. He planned to, honestly, because Gwen was his friend, and his coworker, and she wanted him to be there, but protecting the world from the alien menace sometimes made appointments hard to keep. So he'd need to wear something nice, but functional. It was superstition that made him pause at the pink shirt. His own, utterly pinkless wedding had been so doomed that it had never even made it out of the gate. So wearing the shirt would be like the opposite of what overzealous sports fans did, akin to wearing the same socks over and over without washing, or some other stupid thing, when their favorite team was on a winning streak. He'd wear a shirt to his friend's wedding that he'd been explicitly forbidden to wear to his own, and he'd wear it for good luck. Jack would have had a field day with this kind of thinking, which is why Ianto had no intention of telling him.

Ianto arrived at the hub around seven-thirty. He helped Jack with "paperwork", and Jack was only a little weirded out when Ianto looked to him for reassurance that he in no way resembled a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

Gwen called at eight-oh-five, not quite hysterical, because she was unexpectedly expecting and it was most likely an alien.

It had been a nice thought, anyway.


End file.
